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Abstract - The core components of a network play vital role in in general, researchers are facing another challenge due to
its enhancement. For launching and providing Internet rapid increase in the usage of multimedia traffic
applications and services, vendors have come up with a (voice/video) over the Internet. The goal of this paper is
variety of different technology based network cores and other to analyze the performance comparison of IP, ATM and
components of Internet backbone. Among all the challenges
MPLS based network cores when exposed to multimedia
for an efficient network core, traffic-routing is the most
important. Both the routing algorithms and the router- traffic. Our simulation study shows that MPLS and ATM
technology are supposed to perform efficiently. We find that outperform IP with respect to most of the selected
there are a number of technologies that offer packet routing performance metrics.
service of which IP, ATM and MPLS are prominent. Some The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In
of the routers are designed to provide delivery of specific kind the next section, we briefly review three routers / switches
of traffic. The percentage of real time traffic (voice and based on certain key characteristics. In Section III, we
video) over Internet is rapidly increasing due to growing describe the simulation model and traffic scenarios. We
trend of using real-time traffic oriented applications. People
then present the simulation results and evaluate the
want to talk, watch TV, do video conferencing etc over
Internet. This kind of real time traffic requires extra care
performance of different queuing disciplines in Section IV.
because of more delay sensitivity, minimum QoS Finally, we conclude our paper in Section V.
requirements and limited bandwidth. ATM and MPLS have
some especial features to support real time traffic. On the II NETWORK CORE
other hand, it is almost impossible to replace already existing
IP based network and Internet. Therefore numerous new A network core is backbone of the entire network into
features have been introduced in IP technology to support which other personal or enterprise networks inject data.
real time traffic. Thus, we find enough motivation to Design and capacity of the network core must be robust to
compare these three technologies in terms of their routing
serve all the connected subnets or independent nodes
capability based on different performance metrics using
OPNET simulator. We find that ATM and MPLS
efficiently. Therefore, the core usually consists of high
outperform pure IP (without modification) in terms of delay capacity links and efficient routing devices. We consider
and response time to the exposed data. IP, ATM and MPLS based network cores in our work to
see their effect on the network performance. IP based
I INTRODUCTION network core is designed to give efficient service based on
certain features like best effort delivery, dynamic path
The core components of a network play key role as far establishment etc. Such a core shows poor performance at
as overall network performance is concerned and it has the time of congestion. On the other hand, ATM and
nothing to do with end systems. The technology used for MPLS tackle this problem in an efficient manner by
routing can also make significant difference. Currently, making use of virtual path establishment and layered
we have three main technologies for routing used in architecture approach. Owing to more careful strategies
network cores: IP, ATM and MPLS based routing. IP is about delay and efficient use of available bandwidth, these
the oldest and highly used in network cores and a lot has cores are well suited for multimedia traffic. The key idea
been done and still research is going on it for further of enhanced performance of ATM is its well-defined
improvement. In order to enhance IP performance, structure with exact degree of description about payload
various modifications to the routing techniques were and other packet format. It is a cell based network
proposed [1]. Similarly ATM and MPLS implementations protocol which encodes data traffic into fixed size cells.
were also carried out [2-4]. Moreover, the hybrid The frame size is 53 bytes where 48 bytes are data and the
approach has also been studied in [5-7]. IP is still leading rest are for header information. It is, unlike IP, a
among them due to its pre-diverse usage and has grown connection-oriented technology, in which a connection is
relative features with which ATM and MPLS tried to established between the two endpoints before the transfer
dominate. Along with network core optimization problem of actual data starts. ATM supports several classes of
B Performance Metrics
We use the following metrics for comparison and
analysis purpose:
Delay (sec) represents end-to-end delay. It is the
summation of all delays discussed in previous
section.
Throughput (pps) represents the total number of
packets forwarded to higher layers per second.
Utilization represents percentage of the
consumption of an available channel bandwidth
where a value of 100.0 would indicate full usage.
Delay (msec)
450
IV SIMULATION RESULTS AND ANALYSIS
A Throughput 300
Throughput depends on link speed and nature of the
technology being used to transmit the data. We can see
from the Fig. 2 that the throughput increases linearly with 150
load until the channel gets saturated. Afterwards, it almost
remains almost constant in cases of ATM and MPLS but
0
there is an observable decrease in the case of IP due to
20 30 40 50 100 200
both its connectionless nature and heavy packet drop that
may be because of congestion. Moreover, IP does produce Load
relatively less throughput on account of its connectionless
and best effort service characteristics. On the other hand,
there is a virtual path defined for each packet in ATM and Fig. 3 Average End-to-End Delay of the Network
MPLS based network cores (each router / switch) which is
responsible for the reduction of unreliability factor and C Utilization
thus improvement in overall network performance. This is one of the key metrics to check the efficiency of
the technology. This weighs how efficiently the
60 technology makes use of the available resources such as
IP bandwidth etc.
MPLS
50 ATM The general trend of the utilization is to linearly
increase with load till the point of saturation is reached
Throughput (kpps)
20
0.8
Utilization
10
0.6
0
10 20 30 40 50 100 200
0.4
Load (kpps)
0.2
Received Traffic
better performance for real time traffic as far any type of 0.9
delay is concerned.
0.8
35
IP 0.7
30 MPLS
ATM
Response time (msec)
25 0.6
20 0.5
20 30 40 50 100 200
15 Load